The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Howard had told Keating that he wanted him to switch Able Troop’s focus from strictly fighting the enemy to counterinsurgency work: more meeting with local leaders and assisting on development projects, less driving around trying to find insurgents. That wasn’t so easy: “Nobody told them,” Keating would quip about the enemy. “The little bastards keep shooting at us every day.”

  Some of the chatter picked up over the radio indicated that the HIG insurgents were not planning on heading to Pakistan for the winter this year. Putting a hopeful spin on it, Army analysts interpreted this as a sign that the enemy was worried that the United States might make progress with its counterinsurgency program during the interim, and that the insurgents might return to a Kamdesh that no longer afforded them refuge; HIG was determined, the analysts believed, to prevent that from happening. Keating felt good about the Americans’ chances, but he was also certain that Kamdesh wouldn’t be the end of it.

  “Ultimately,” he wrote to his father, “I think we are going to dismantle this organization”—referring to HIG. “But one thing we’re still a little slow on the uptake about is that in this tribal culture, another group will replace them. A group that is just as vulnerable to greed, infighting and murder as the last. We can change the faces and names, [but] we will never change the values and the vision for the future that these people have spent five thousand years developing, perfecting and perpetuating through their common law, religion and teaching.”

  “I can’t wait for you to get here,” Keating had emailed Gooding.

  The counterinsurgency efforts commenced. Keating, Saenz, and Boulio traveled to the village of Mandigal, to the north of Kamdesh on the way to Barg-e-Matal. Keating planned to join up there with Lieutenant Colonel Tony Feagin to conduct a shura with the village elders, while Saenz and Boulio were hoping to find some locals who might become intelligence sources. Feagin headed the provincial reconstruction team in Mehtar Lam, Laghman Province, and was responsible for all of Nuristan as well. In August, he’d moved into the Kamdesh PRT. While Able Troop was in charge of security at Kamdesh, Feagin was the overall senior mission commander, with a staff of about thirty-five people under him focused on the development of the area, including a civil affairs team, a military engineer officer, and two Army Corps of Engineers civilians.

  Saenz and Boulio knew that the best pools of candidates to serve as sources were, first, elders looking to plead their case for a project to be undertaken in their village; and second, twenty- to twenty-five-year-old unemployed, semieducated males, literate and with maybe with some high school under their belts but not much more. The likeliest members of this latter group often had something a bit off about them and seemed a touch desperate—perhaps they’d been picked on, or they needed cash to get married or to support a large family. Saenz and Boulio used such weaknesses to persuade these men to work with the United States, offering them a way to feel better about themselves while also helping their nation.

  Mandigal was a medium-sized village, typical for the area, with log-and-stone homes stacked one on top of another up the hillside. As the Americans entered the settlement, their eyes were drawn to a wooden overhang resembling a covered bridge, its huge wooden pillars decorated with intricate and ornate carvings, a craft for which the Nuristanis were renowned. Keating and Feagin were met by the elders and escorted to the shura room, in a building next to the main road. Served glasses of scalding tea saturated with sugar and presented with cookies and bowls of raisins, nuts, and jujubes, the U.S. officers and the elders discussed the need for everyone to work together and then went over a prioritized list of projects for the village, the most important of which was a micro-hydroelectric plant.

  As Saenz and Boulio, accompanied by First Sergeant Yerger and four of his headquarters soldiers, walked down the main road, villagers gathered on rooftops and in doorways to stare at them. The intelligence collectors made small talk with anyone who seemed even remotely friendly, asking basic questions about the village and the lives of its people, trying to loosen everyone up.

  One of the local Afghan policemen told Saenz that he would take her to meet the women of his family if she wanted. Saenz immediately accepted the invitation.

  The twenty-five-year-old Saenz had been a student at Texas State University when she watched the second plane hit the tower. Her brother was in an Army Ranger battalion, and her first thought was, What’s going to happen to him? In the weeks after 9/11, the two of them often spoke about what she could do next. Saenz wanted to help plan missions, to collect information that would prepare soldiers like her brother for the battlefield. With this in mind, she joined the Army.

  Sitting in what appeared to be a biblical-era log and stone house in Mandigal, Saenz was a long way from Texas. The villagers gave off the odor of poverty, of dirt and sweat. There was even a faint whiff of urine in the air. The children had distended bellies. They were all very tiny.

  “Here,” one Afghan woman said to Saenz through her interpreter. “Take my child.” She handed her baby to the American.

  They were beautiful, the five Afghan women before Saenz—the young mother, her mother and grandmother, her sister and sister-in-law. Their skin tones ranged from fair to deeply tanned, and their eyes were piercing greens and blues. Often when Saenz went out on her intelligence-gathering operations, the locals would tell her that they were descended from Alexander the Great, and these women sure looked it, though experts would have dismissed such claims as folklore.

  They were friendly, even warm, these women—hence the young mother’s offer to let her hold her baby, Saenz thought. She explained to them what the PRT was all about, how the Americans were there to develop the area and make the Nuristanis’ lives better with water-pipe schemes, wells, and schools.

  She thought to herself, Sweet! Female sources. Maybe some of them will get upset with their husbands and give me information.

  “I work directly for the commander at the camp, on security issues,” she told the women. “If you ever see anyone causing problems, let me know.”

  “Take my child,” the young mother said again, though Saenz was already holding her baby.

  And then she realized what the woman meant.

  “ ‘Take my child with you,’ ” the translator elaborated. “Take him with you and raise him in America.”

  Saenz tried to explain how important it was that the baby be raised by his own parents, how life in the village would improve someday soon, but she wasn’t sure even she believed that.

  Those who write romantically about the military often refer to bands of brothers. But as anyone who has had a sibling knows, brothers fight, sometimes quite a bit. Keating had been looking forward to Gooding’s arrival. The two were roughly the same age—Keating was twenty-seven, Gooding was thirty—and had attended rival high schools in Maine. Their parents knew many of the same people.

  Matt Gooding came from a family steeped in military service. Both of his grandfathers were veterans of World War II, and both of his parents were Vietnam veterans—his dad a Cavalry officer who’d done eighteen months in Da Nang, his mother an Army nurse. In his sophomore year at Ohio University, Gooding, then a criminology major thinking about a career with the DEA, the FBI, or the U.S. Marshals, had looked around and seen a hundred or so other students on the same exact track. So instead he’d taken the road less traveled, at least at Ohio University: he’d joined ROTC, and then he’d just kept on going. On September 11, 2001, Gooding had been in Kosovo with the 3rd Infantry Division. He’d decided to stay in the military beyond his four-year commitment so he could lead a company in combat against those responsible for the attack.

  Keating thought Gooding was a good storyteller and a decent guy, fun to talk to one on one, but when it came to combat decisions, his captain drove him crazy. “We fight over every aspect of leadership and the direction of the troop,” Keating complained to his father. He was convinced that Gooding was too conservative when it came to using American force.

&nb
sp; The truth was, Gooding never really felt comfortable in the mountains. Up here, you never know who you’re shooting at, he mused. Even before his immersion in COIN doctrine, he had been cautious about authorizing his troops to fire or to initiate any “show of force” that might end up killing civilians. He and his men were there, he felt, to win over the local populace.

  The problem was, the PRT kept getting attacked: by the fall of 2006, enemy strikes were coming three times a week on average. A rocket missed Command Sergeant Major Byers’s helicopter one day by a matter of only seconds—a close call that led command at Forward Operating Base Naray to require more planning before any helicopters were sent in to the Kamdesh PRT, and also to encourage night flights. The PRT was getting lit up, and troops were getting maimed and killed; as far as a lot of the men were concerned, civilians who turned a blind eye toward the insurgency were the enemy as well. Many of the officers felt they had to do something, and Keating was all about doing.

  In Gooding’s view, Keating personified what troop commanders often referred to as “the Fighting XO”—the second-in-command who was continually exasperated by the “failings” of his immediate superior, a not-uncommon type in any walk of life. Whenever an opportunity arose that would allow him to rally troops and lead them on a convoy or to recon a road, Keating was always the first to volunteer. He didn’t seem to be able to get over the fact that he was no longer a platoon leader of men but instead an executive officer in charge of logistics and maintenance, a job that seemed to bore him no end.

  Keating’s eagerness could, Gooding believed, get the better of him. Within a week of the captain’s return, an Afghan with a flashlight was spotted one night on the mountain above the camp. Keating rushed to the command post. “Request permission to engage the enemy,” he said to Gooding.

  Gooding thought Keating was overreacting because of the large firefight the Barbarians had experienced in August—and it wasn’t just Keating, either; many of the troops seemed to be on edge, waiting for the next big attack. Gooding himself, however, was decidedly not on edge, having just arrived back in country from his R&R, and he told Keating to hold fire until the Afghan with the flashlight could be definitively identified as a threat. No weapon was ever observed on that occasion, so Gooding never gave permission to engage.

  Gooding was abiding by the Rules of Engagement, following what he thought of as the steady example of the late Lieutenant Colonel Fenty. He knew he was more conservative in some of his decisions than Keating himself would have been, but he saw his subordinate as still having the young soldier’s “I am invincible” attitude, with a dash of the teenage rebel thrown in for good measure.

  On another night, a Special Forces team was departing from the camp under the cover of darkness. A guard post witnessed several Afghans moving into a position above the road leading back to Naray. It looked as if they were setting an ambush. Keating organized a patrol and asked Gooding for permission to fire on the Afghans to clear them out. From the road, Keating could not identify any specific weapons or any hostile intent, so Gooding, once again observing the Rules of Engagement, denied him permission to fire. Keating’s annoyance was clear in his voice—and Gooding didn’t like it. He wasn’t fond of making decisions like this, but he also didn’t want to kill the members of some family out looking for their lost goat.

  A guard at Observation Post Warheit then called in: other Afghans, definitively with weapons and a radio, were peering down the mountain.

  Gooding now reversed his decision, persuaded that the insurgents above were controlling confederates below. “Permission to engage,” he told Keating.

  Keating’s men fired. Both sides shot back and forth; within forty-five minutes, Apaches were on the scene. The insurgents took cover in the homes of Kamdeshis, and the Apaches took the fight to them. Intelligence would later come in indicating that several of the insurgents had been wounded and were subsequently evacuated to Pakistan. More immediately, however, the troops of 3-71 Cav became aware that innocent Afghans had also been hurt in the action: six civilians, aged three to forty, had been cut up by shrapnel from the Apache’s 30-millimeter barrage. Their families took the wounded to Observation Post Warheit, and 3-71 Cav had them medevacked to Bagram.

  The next day, nearly three dozen Kamdesh elders came down to the PRT to express their anger over the incident. They met with Feagin and Gooding in a building that was still under construction.

  “You told us when you came here that you would not hurt innocent and peaceful people,” said one, speaking through a translator.26 “You have big guns and helicopters with good technology, surely you can tell the difference between those who are innocent and those who are not. You told us if we helped you, the Americans would not harm us. We are prisoners in our villages now!”

  Feagin explained that there had been “no intent to target anyone but our enemy. If the enemy continues to fight us, many more will die. I am certain.”

  At that moment, gunfire sounded in the distance.

  “This is part of the problem,” Feagin said, motioning in the direction of the fire. “The only thing the enemy can bring is fear, intimidation, and death.” He reminded the elders that the six wounded Kamdeshis had been transported to Bagram and were receiving exemplary medical care.

  “Mack” took this opportunity to weigh in. Mack was a CIA case officer who had come to the Kamdesh base with some others from his world; they’d built a little cabin there and started their own information-collection business. Most of the time, Mack tried to keep a low profile. This was not one of those times. A muscular former Special Forces soldier, he told the assembled group a story about a neighbor he’d once had at his farm back in the States, whose ill-behaved dog posed a problem. Things got so bad, he said, that he had to ask his neighbor to put the dog down. When the neighbor refused, Mack took matters into his own hands. The implication was, of course, that he and his friends would likewise put down the bad dogs of the valley—the insurgents—if the Kamdesh elders didn’t take care of them themselves.

  The story did not go over well. Bad dogs? The elders seemed revolted by the metaphor: dogs were reviled in this part of the world. In some cases, insurgents were brothers or sons to these elders, and their actions were motivated by the desire to protect their village. These were not rabid beasts. Don’t use analogies, the intelligence collector Adam Boulio reminded himself. They don’t translate.

  A few days after the shura, Boulio went to the Papristan section of Kamdesh Village to photograph the damage caused by the Apaches and to record the names of those villagers who intended to file claims. He took pictures of bullet-riddled walls and broken windows, but as the hours passed, more and more Kamdeshis began making what seemed to him obviously bogus claims, holding up shoddy mattresses, broken washbasins, and other junk and blaming what was clearly ordinary squalor on the helicopters. Boulio took it all down anyway, noting which losses he thought were real.

  Despite Boulio’s attempts to smooth things over with the Kamdeshis, Gooding would come to think of the Apache attack and the ill-fated shura as calamitous setbacks in the counterinsurgency effort. In his view, 3-71 Cav never managed to repair the damage these incidents caused.

  In a reflective mood, Ben Keating wrote to his father, “I’ve struggled during quiet times with the question of my mortality. I don’t fear death and during my most honest moments I really don’t assume its nearness to me…. I still believe that God has a plan for my life that extends beyond this deployment; but I’m also very confident that this is a path He has set me on and that I’m treating it in a manner He asks of me. When the bullets start flying all of those thoughts are banished and I just act—further evidence to me that He is with me.”

  Whether or not the Lord was with Ben Keating, many of the officers of 3-71 Cav increasingly felt that some of the Americans with them were leading the mission down an infernal path. No one doubted the motives of Snyder and his Special Forces troops or any of the other special-operations teams tha
t moved in and out of the region. (Mack and his CIA officers were another, and bizarre, matter.) But their actions were sometimes messy, and 3-71 Cav troops had to clean up after them.

  There was nothing 3-71 Cav could do about that, however. At Forward Operating Base Naray, a call would come in that “Task Force Blue”—a code name for Navy SEALs—would be arriving in a certain area in two hours, and the 3-71 troops would just have to try to stay out of the way. Questions about the propriety of specific missions were then left to be answered by conventional forces that had had nothing to do with the operations themselves—some of which involved acts committed over the border in Pakistan. CIA teams and Special Forces troops would kill men who they said were insurgent leaders, and who in most cases almost surely were—but when they weren’t, it was 3-71 Cav that felt the heat.

  For some, collateral damage was a fact of warfare that was as acceptable as the recoil of a gun.

  Led by Staff Sergeant Adam Sears, the Hoosier who’d been on the landing zone when Fenty’s Chinook crashed, four Humvees containing members of Able Troop’s 2nd Platoon left the Kamdesh outpost one October day to investigate a tip that there was an IED under a small bridge about a mile down the road to the east. The squad found nothing at the location in question, so the drivers began turning their vehicles around to return to the base. It was a difficult process, as they had to hit the sweet spot in steering: the road was narrow, but turning the front wheels too sharply could lock up the truck’s gearbox.

  As fate would have it, one of the sergeants did exactly that, so Sears sent Sergeant Nick Anderson back to the outpost in another vehicle to fetch the particular tool needed to work on the gearbox; he was accompanied by Michael Hendy, whose own Humvee kept stalling. As Anderson made the tight turn in to the gate of the outpost, his Humvee’s gearbox seized up as well, and another truck had to come tow it out of the entry control point. Anderson and Hendy grabbed two other Humvees, the proper tool, and a mechanic and went back down the road to where the others were waiting.